Black ink pen drawing of a crescent moon with a fern-like pattern inside, surrounded by curling vines, tendrils and small leaves, shown as a tattoo design on paper.

Crescent moon with botanical swirls

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A crescent moon is drawn in bold black linework, with its inner curve filled by feathery fern-like fronds and small chevron shapes. Fine swirling vines, tendrils, buds and small leaves spread outwards from the moon on both sides, forming an open, asymmetrical composition. The drawing is in black ink on off-white paper, with no colour.

Botanical Geometric Crescent moon Moon Swirl Vine Tendril Leaves Fern Foliage Chevron Bud

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You learn the lock at the bottom of the Kennet by feel before you learn its name, the paddles stiff with rust and the cill slick with weed. Your father brings the Mabel Ann through at dusk, and you stand on the gunwale with a boathook, watching the crescent rise over the poplars like a paring someone has dropped.

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Your grandmother used to say the moon was a boat too, tipped on its side, and that ferns grew in its hollow where the light could not reach. You didn't believe her until the August you found fronds pressed flat in the gap of the lock gate, pale green and curled at the tips like the tendrils painted on the cabin roses.

Your father tells you to leave them be. You don't. You fill a jam jar from the cut, lay one frond inside, and row the skiff out past the moored hulls to where the moon lies broken on the water. You tip the jar. The fern slides off and the reflection shivers into rings that spread outwards, open and uneven, the same loose scroll as the lines on the cabin side.

By morning the rings have gone, but the towpath wall is greener than it was, and a bud has unfurled in the crack where the frond must have landed. Your father looks at it for a long time. Then he hands you the sable brush and says the roses on the stern will need touching up.